We had the opportunity to attend SAP Ariba’s Live user conference in Las Vegas, held from March 21st till 23rd 2017, at the Cosmopolitan. The event was well attended with over 3200 attendees, good partner representation and influencer selection.
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Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:
Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top 3:
Ariba is on a roll– A few years ago it seemed that Ariba (add an SAP in front of every time you read Ariba going forward) maybe in the state of a being the sleeping beauty of enterprise software. Always there – but not going anywhere. That has changed in the recent year and Ariba now has the momentum to show it: Even for SAP adding 10 of the Top 100 Global Businesses in 12 months is quite a feat – and both a testament to the market position that Ariba has achieved as well as the attractiveness of what Ariba has recently provided and plans offer soon. And suppliers will pay attention when hearing that Ariba has added B300US$ in 2016 in network volume. Similar to e-commerce we can see the networks synergies playing in favor of Ariba.
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| Atzberger - Make Procurement Awesome |
Functionality Push– Last year Ariba unveiled the Guided Buying approach, both a simplification on the product side and usability improvement for the UX. The combination has worked well for Ariba and proven popular with customers. Spot Purchases were announced, too and are available now, the upcoming implementation at Latin American trading powerhouse Mercado Libre is a proof point that Ariba has built good functionality. When asking Mercado Libre for the reasons for selecting Ariba, they first mentioned the synergy effects of using SAP already – something that bides well for further sales of Spot Purchases into the SAP install base.
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| Ariba 2016 Momentum |
That the combination of UX improvement and simplification is working out for Ariba, is also seen by the plans to bring the same concept to bear on the Supplier side with the Light Account: During the keynote, we saw the demo of onboarding a new supplier in 2 minutes, something as unthinkable as well as un-achievable in today’s business practice.
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| McDermott & Atzberger Q&A |
Blockchain meets Purchasing– In a sign of times, this was also a conference with a Blockchain announcement, and SAP picked Hyperledger for its first dabs into distributed ledger technology. Certainly, a good choice, though SAP likely will also have to support other blockchain technologies, but Hyperledger is a good start. And few places lend themselves more to the blockchain scenario than purchasing, so it’s good to see SAP innovating.
MyPOV
It is remarkable how fast SAP Ariba is moving, especially when one considers (which was not much part of the public talks at the conference) that Ariba is in the midst of a major re-platform endeavor – moving off Oracle and onto SAP HANA. Usually vendors take a noticeable pause while undergoing exercises like these – not so much SAP Ariba. It is good to see the vendor doubling down on things that work, e.g. the UX improvements and the overall process simplifications, while at the same time innovating with blockchain, team productivity software (Microsoft Teams was shown) and speech recognition. Still a tall order – to make a traditionally boring administrative software like Procurement awesome… to get there Ariba has shown the willingness to partner and be an open platform and finally has embraced lofty goals such as diversity, or even more ambitious – the quest of ending modern age slavery, a topic near and dear to the heart of Ariba boss Alex Atzberger.
On the concern side, Ariba has to deliver a lot while a lot is happening. Never an easy scenario for any vendor, so we will be keeping an eye, especially on the platform side, how Ariba will progress in the next quarters.
Finally, it was good to see that SAP seems to have found the right length of ‘leash’ for the Ariba subsidiary – not too close to stop innovation, and allowing freedom (e.g. manifested in Ariba using angular.js and not Fiori) but also have leverage (e.g. with HANA). That SAP CEO McDermott said in a Q&A (see a Storify Tweet Story here) that he would be open to e.g. integrate with perennial co-opetitor Oracle, speaks signs of the flexibility and pragmatism that is lived now at the top of both companies, always a good sign for customers.
More on SAP Ariba
More on SAP:
And more about SAP technology:
More on SAP Ariba
- Event Report - SAP Ariba Live - Make Procurement Cool Again - read here
- News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step in a long journey - read here
More on SAP:
- Event Report - SAP Capital Markets and S/4HANA Update - Good Plan - Execution matters in 2017 - read here
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- Event Report - Event Report - SAP TechEd Barcelona - Analytics, ML, PaaS and HANA 2 - read here
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- News Analysis - Microsoft announces SAP's choice of Azure to help enterprises transform HR - The SaaS land grab is on - read here
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- First Take - SAP BW/4HANA - Data Gravity and Cloud win - read here
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- Event Report - SAP Insider Vienna - HCP, BI and SuccessFactors are the takeaways - read here
- Event Report - SAP Sapphire 2016 - Top 3 Positives & Concerns: SAP changes - probably for the better - read here
- First Take - SAP Sapphire Day #2 Keynote - read here
- News Analysis - SAP and Microsoft usher in new era of partnership to accelerate digital transformation in the cloud - read here
- First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
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- Progress Report - SAP SuccessFactors makes good progress - now needs appeal beyond SAP - read here
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- Event Report - SAP Ariba Live - Make Procurement Cool Again - read here
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- Event Report - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Good Progress sprinkled with innovative ideas and challenging the status quo - read here
- News Analysis - WorkForce Software Announces Global Reseller Agreement with SAP - read here
- First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Day #1 Keynote Top 3 Takeaways - read here
- News Analysis - SAP SuccessFactors introduces Next Generation of HCM software - read here
- News Analysis - SAP delivers next release of SAP HANA - SPS 10 - Ready for BigData and IoT - read here
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- News Analysis - SAP and IBM join forces ... read here
- First Take - SAP Sapphire Bill McDermott Day #1 Keynote - read here
- In Depth - S/4HANA qualities as presented by Plattner - play for play - read here
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- Progress Report - SAP HCM makes progress and consolidates - a lot of moving parts - read here
- First Take - SAP launches S/4HANA - The good, the challenge and the concern - read here
- First Take - SAP's IoT strategy becomes clearer - read here
- SAP appoints a CTO - some musings - read here
- Event Report - SAP's SAPtd - (Finally) more talk on PaaS, good progress and aligning with IBM and Oracle - read here
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- First Take - SAP SuccessFactors SuccessConnect - Top 3 Takeaways Day 1 Keynote - read here.
- Event Report - Sapphire - SAP finds its (unique) path to cloud - read here
- What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire - read here
- News Analysis - SAP becomes more about applications - again - read here
- Market Move - SAP acquires Fieldglass - off to the contingent workforce - early move or reaction? Read here.
- SAP's startup program keep rolling – read here.
- Why SAP acquired KXEN? Getting serious about Analytics – read here.
- SAP steamlines organization further – the Danes are leaving – read here.
- Reading between the lines… SAP Q2 Earnings – cloudy with potential structural changes – read here.
- SAP wants to be a technology company, really – read here
- Why SAP acquired hybris software – read here.
- SAP gets serious about the cloud – organizationally – read here.
- Taking stock – what SAP answered and it didn’t answer this Sapphire [2013] – read here.
- Act III & Final Day – A tale of two conference – Sapphire & SuiteWorld13 – read here.
- The middle day – 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
- A tale of 2 keynotes and press releases – Sapphire & SuiteWorld – read here.
- What I would like SAP to address this Sapphire – read here.
- Why 3rd party maintenance is key to SAP’s and Oracle’s success – read here.
- Why SAP acquired Camillion – read here.
- Why SAP acquired SmartOps – read here.
- Next in your mall – SAP and Oracle? Read here
- Event Prieview - SAP TechEd 2015 - read here
- News Analysis - SAP Unveils New Cloud Platform Services and In-Memory Innovation on Hadoop to Accelerate Digital Transformation – A key milestone for SAP read here
- HANA Cloud Platform - Revisited - Improvements ahead and turning into a real PaaS - read here
- News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenSource - key steps - but what is the direction? - Read here.
- News Analysis - SAP moves Ariba Spend Visibility to HANA - Interesting first step in a long journey - read here
- Launch Report - When BW 7.4 meets HANA it is like 2 + 2 = 5 - but is 5 enough - read here
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- News Analysis – SAP slices and dices into more Cloud, and of course more HANA – read here.
- SAP gets serious about open source and courts developers – about time – read here.
- My top 3 takeaways from the SAP TechEd keynote – read here.
- SAP discovers elasticity for HANA – kind of – read here.
- Can HANA Cloud be elastic? Tough – read here.
- SAP’s Cloud plans get more cloudy – read here.
- HANA Enterprise Cloud helps SAP discover the cloud (benefits) – read here
Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here). Don't miss the Day #2 keynote Storify collection here.